After another couple of miles, Pie lifted his head and blew softly through his nostrils. He knew better than to warn our prey. “He smells water,” I said softly. “There must be a spring up ahead. That’s where the bastard’s going. He must’ve run out of water.” And monsters or not, they needed water the same as any other creature.
We picked up the pace to a slow gallop. We passed a horse ridden to death, its tongue as dry and lifeless as the sand it lolled across. Another victim. Maybe that made me pick up the pace a little, pulling ahead of Scotch. Or maybe it was that I was so damn tired of them. Slaughterers, nightmares made flesh, evil…evil in a way that even I had never known the meaning of. I’d put down so many of them, but at that moment I wanted this one dead more than all the others put together. He’d killed two of our comrades, rode an innocent animal to an agonizing death, ruined all that I could see and ever would see, even the stars at night were blinking out one by one. For all that, this one meant more than all the others put together. I wanted it. I needed it.
When you want it, it sharpens you, makes you better.
When you need it, it makes you sloppy.
I was sloppy.
Pie and I crested a gentle swell and I saw the water. It was a putrid shade of green, glimmering in a red rimmed basin with stunted, oddly twisted shrubs clustered here and there around it. I heard slurping and saw a tree with silvery leprous bark and long blade shaped leaves. The tree had grown in the painfully sharp shape of a bow bent beyond endurance until its leaves trailed in the water, drinking with a passionate thirst. What I didn’t see was the son of a bitch with the gun.
Not until it was too late.
I felt the bullet hit me in the chest. They say it feels like being kicked by a mule. Yeah, that’s what they say. It didn’t. It was a hundred times worse. There was the free-fall as I was thrown from the saddle and the hard thump as I hit the ground. All I could see then was sky. I longed for the forever-gone blue or the black of night with the thousand and one stars…not the random handful that remained, but gray was all there was. The gray of nothing. The gray of indifference. The gray that would slowly eat this world’s remains and move on to eat the whole of reality for all I knew.
I heard Pie lie down next to me with a grunt, blocking me from further fire. It’d be nice to say I’d known Pie since he was a frisky colt, but Pie had known me when I’d been the shaky legged newborn. He’d no doubt thought I was a nuisance the same as I’d once thought about Scotch. I hope he’d changed his mind like I’d changed mine.
Scotch’s rifle fired, the shots so quick that the sound blended into one massive crack. I heard a scream, I was glad of that. I wanted to hear that murdering freak shriek until his throat bled and much more—so much more, but I settled for the scream and then a second one followed by a splash. I managed to turn my head towards the spring and saw Pie’s lambent gold eyes staring into mine. The cat’s-eye pupils dilated. “Hungry,” he muttered, the words pushed harshly through the long throat. “Eat. Now. Hungry.”
“Go,” I said, words slow and painful. “Feast as you deserve, honored one.”
He stared at me longer then dipped his head. The kelpie rose to his hooves and cantered into the water. He buried his teeth, sharp and curved, in the flesh of the dead human lying the opposite bank. There was a flash of tangled beard, gaping mouth, and an eyeball pulped by a bullet from Scotch’s rifle before the body was dragged into the water. I wouldn’t have thought it was that deep, but kelpies are versatile and Pie and the body both disappeared under the boiling surface. In a moment or two the water calmed until a geyser, far redder with blood than poisonous green, gushed upwards. Then it fell, splashing back heavily, and beneath the water Pie fed. He’d more than earned it. The desert was hard on him. He dripped water wherever he walked, that was how kelpies were born—in water. They spent their lives leaving it wherever they went, which was good for Scotch and me when springs were few and far between. We had our own water source. But Pie had been meant for Lochs and rivers--the desert pushed him to the far reaches of his endurance. He needed this meal.
“Blind fool. Suicidal half-wit. Careless. Idiotic beyond all measure of the word.” Scotch was kneeling beside me. “How did you last in the courts, much less the Unseelie Court, with strategy such as that?” He used his knife, a human-made knife to cut my shirt open with one subtle slice. We had no blades of our own. Once we’d come from Under-the-Hill to the Earth that was now, all our dwarven and elvish-forged blades had disintegrated. Our rainbow-chased armor turned to dust and blew away. The magic that had made them had been undone by a human magic grimmer and blacker than we could ever comprehend, because it had torn something. It had slashed through reality itself to destroy not only their world but all the others unfortunate enough to be close to theirs. As close as Under-the Hill had been.
“I relied on my unfathomably handsome face.” I tried for a grin, but didn’t make the shadow of a smile. “He was a human. A grubbing in the mud human. A worthless adversary.”
“Excepting these worthless adversaries destroyed their world and ours,” he exhaled. “Ego and vanity, always the downfall of the Dark Court.” He pulled off his gloves and probed the bullet wound in my upper chest with his bare fingers. They felt warm against the icy chill of my skin. He already knew. From the appearance of the wound, he would. I’d seen the same wounds before and the pain—it was far worse than it should’ve been. I didn’t need to see the mercury tainted veins pulsing and striating outward, my black blood flowing far more freely than a normal bullet or blade would cause.
I said it for him. “It’s silver. There is nothing you can do, Ialach. The Wild Hunt will go on without me and I know I am the luckier for it.” Being a cowboy wasn’t as distracting now as it had been. Taunting my comrade with those stupid peasant words now would’ve been cruel. I was cruel—had been cruel. I was Unseelie, born and bred to malice. Yet when I saw true malice when the humans killed their mother, our mother, I knew the Dark Courts knew nothing of genuine cruelty. Nothing but pretenders to the throne were we. I’d saved what remained of my old self for the humans and I’d done things to the ones we’d caught—terrible yet justly deserved things--that kept some of the hungry shadows in me alive.
Ialach deserved none of that though. If I were to die, I’d die speaking as I’d spoken for most of my life. Better he have memories of our past lives than the one we lived now. “You will not die,” he said between clenched teeth. “You bastard. You will not.”
“No?” I felt the stirring of the dark amusement of old. The Seelie were so determined, so noble, so fearless, yes, in the face of death itself. So very Ialach. Still, I liked to think I had corrupted him, if only a little these past ten years. Then more waves of pain came and I shut up, intent on biting off my lower lip before humiliating myself by screaming.
“No,” he said, the determination as palpable as my pain. “When the sun sets for the final time I do not want to be alone. Even your constant ear-shattering imitation of speech is better than that.”
I focused on him to see the pretense of humor creasing the sun-creased skin around his eyes. Actual humor from a nose-in-the-air, death before dishonor, shimmering robes, white horses, constantly with the never-ending…the never-Oberon’s shriveled worthless balls-ending ethereal singing High Court Fey. I had taught him something after all. Or he had taught me something—that you can be enemies so long that you are actually closer than friends. He taught me that word as well. There was no word for friend in the Dark Court—ally, comrade-in-arms, former ally (sorry-is-that-my-dagger-in-your-back)—but not friend. I grinned, tasting my own blood, and asked, “Can you make sure I die with my boots on, pardner?”
Let him remember this moment with a laugh or a groan or, best of all, annoyance, but let it be this moment…not my death. And I was going to die. I had no doubt of that. If we had our magic left to us, I might have had a chance, but we did not. When the world died, we had felt the shake and death rattle of it in Under-the-H
ill. Our home might be a step to one side on the human’s reality, but it was also a reflection of the Earth itself. Reflections are the first to go. Our home began to die as well. Those legends and fables returned to our memories as the truth they were. Many of us managed to remember the way and galloped our steeds to the world of man to see what was wrong? What could be done?
Everything and nothing.
The human race’s unnatural magic obliterated ours. What we’d once had, we had no more. Our weapons and armor faded away. Any charms, spells, or pure destructive streams of magic were gone. We were no more than humans with pointed ears and a severe allergy to silver. It was pathetic. We discovered we couldn’t go home again—not that it mattered. Time Under-the-Hill passed as a river compared to a stone on the bank that was earth. If we had had the magic left to re-open the door, we would have found nothing. Not death, but nothing at all. Earth had died, but Under-the-Hill was only the memory of a gravestone. Those of us that had left had barely escaped in time. Under-the-Hill had washed away, we knew, for no one there had ever followed us out.
I closed my eyes, clenched dirt and sand in my fists as the silver-agony spasmed through my body.
Fairy tales…I had been thinking of fairy tales. Humans remembered us better than we remembered them. Iron and silver, some of them recalled our weaknesses. When we joined together, Light and Dark, to vent our fury on those that would be the Grim Reaper of us all, and unleashed the first Wild Hunt in a thousand of their years, tens of thousands of ours, a few of them knew enough to fight back and how. A bullet was a bullet, but a silver one was a bullet made of the deadliest of poisons.
Pain in the ass humans. What were they living for? We lived for vengeance. When they had slain the world and perhaps all of existence as well, tearing a gaping wound in reality itself, I’d have thought they’d have lain down and gone with it. But no. Stupid and predatory to the end.
Stupid, but they had learned magic of their own. It took me forever to puzzle out what an automobile…a car…was supposed to do, but when I did, that was magic I would’ve liked to have seen on the move. Their magic was greater than ours had ever been, cities I couldn’t have imagined if I had tried, and a surplus of weapons that, despite our heritage, even we of the Unseelie Court found to be obscene. With our swords gone, we’d learned to use the least offensive of them: guns.
Then there were the ones called nuclear bombs. Little suns. They had possessed thousands upon thousands of those, a human had told me after I sliced off his ear. When the end came, they had none left…that information had come with the removal of his other ear. I’d removed his nose as well…wasn’t that one of their sayings? Cut off thy nose to spite thy own face? And wasn’t that precisely what they had done? Thousands of small venomous suns erupting all at once…in one last battle…one last pitting of ego against ego.
And here we were.
For now.
I didn’t know how long it would take the earth to rot away, the last star to disappear, the sun to set and not rise again, but the Hunt would remain…at least until there was no one left to punish. And as much as Ialach would deny it, the Hunt would survive without me.
“Why do you call yourself Seven? There has never been a time you have not called yourself that and these years we have ridden together you would never tell me why.”
I slitted my eyes. “I am dying,” I pushed the words through the pain, “and you would like a bed-time story?”
“It would be only fair as you were the one to name me.” Ialach shrugged as he placed the point of his knife against my chest and sliced me open much as a goose for a banquet. Or a pig for a barbeque with all the fixings. The slippery, words of the Fey—water over a pebbled stream--and the harsh ones of humans were mixed up now. “And I thought it might distract you,” he added, but those words were distant. Far away.
I sucked in a breath and decided breathing was distinctly overrated. I didn’t think I’d closed my eyes again but the darkness came all the same as I felt fingers slide past my skin and into my chest. Then those things like feeling and pain went away and I lived in the memories. I had named Ialach Scotch. But it hadn’t begun as Scotch.
It had started as Buttercup.
Seelie and Unseelie, enemies before anyone knew when, but that didn’t mean we didn’t all know each other, duel with each other, insult each other, screw each other. The Courts were small, time was long. What else was there to do? Ialach happened to be the only unlucky Seelie bastard to be born with yellow hair. All the others naturally had wind-swept silver-white veils to rival the feathers of the purest white dove. The dove was a notoriously stupid bird, which seemed appropriate to we black-haired Unseelie. I was the first to pounce on the difference. There were flowers that were the same color as the buttercups outside in the human world, with an equally embarrassing name that grew Under-the-Hill—in the High Court at least, needless to say. In the Dark Court we had black roses that wept tears of blood and scarlet lilies that ate butterflies. Yes…ate butterflies.
We were truly beyond pretentious.
From the moment I spotted Ialach he became Buttercup to the entire Dark Court. That was the cause of our first duel. It was a tie, but as I swore up and down it was only because I could not stop laughing every time I addressed him as Lord Buttercup.
When we had come here and discovered what the humans had wrought, I’d stumbled across a sweet in one of their shops. Butterscotch it had been called and it was similar to the color of Ialach’s then much shorter hair. As a peace offering between new partners, I called him Butterscotch instead of Buttercup and tried to kill him for only the first week or two. Eventually we discovered something from the time we remembered humans last: uisge beatha. The ‘water of life’. Scotch whisky. Scotch had seized upon several bottles and drank nothing but that or water from then on. Taking the name for his own. After three years, I gave in and stopped telling anyone and everyone in the outposts we passed the truth of it. Once you decide not to kill your partner, you have his back. Not in the Courts, but here. Always here.
And then he goes and stabs you in the chest. Where had I gone wrong?
I woke up to a night sky. Hazily I counted ten lonely stars. Not long now. No, not long. I coughed against a dry throat and asked hoarsely, “Are my boots on?”
“No.” Scotch’s voice was beside me. I turned my head to see him squatting by a small fire to add another chunk of dried manure. “Just in case you were weak and useless enough to die, I wanted you to wander what lies beyond eternity in your socks cursing my name. My real name.”
I was lying on a sleeping bag, covered with two blankets, but I could see my toes. I wiggled them. Nothing but socks was right, the bastard. Not that I didn’t like socks. That was one thing humans had done right. Thick, warm socks beat striding black marble floors in silk hose and knee-high boots…oh, damn, and a crimson lined cloak that was be-spelled to drop blood-tipped black thorns in my path. I really had been a fucking douche-bag. I didn’t know what a fucking douche-bag was, but a human had spat it at me before I gutted him. I took that to mean it was a fair enough insult.
“And why aren’t I dead? With the silver and then you helpfully stabbing me in the chest, I expected something less in the living realm.”
“I didn’t stab you in the chest. I cannot believe all the Seelie that you bested in duels. Swatting pixies should’ve been beyond you. You whine like a satyr who’s lost his nymphs and his cock.” He sat beside me, stirring a can of beans. Another human invention, less appreciated than the socks. “I didn’t stab you. I cut only as deep as needed to remove the bullet.” He had his gloves off and I could see the silver-burns on his fingers where he had plucked it out of me. “Unfortunately it wasn’t deep enough to discover if you in fact have a heart. Now none will ever know.” He ate a bite of beans. “Then I stitched you up with a few of Pie’s tail hairs.”
I was alive. Shit. That was damn near unheard of. Human speech, bad habits—easy to slide back into when you can thro
w all that grand ‘leave your partner with a good memory’ fairy princess crap out the window. “They’ve tried taking silver bullets out before. They go too deep. Nobody lives. The poison of the metal spreads too fast.”
“Guess I’m a helluva sight damn faster than any other sumbitch ‘round these parts.” Scotch grinned.
I laughed, groaned and held my chest, and laughed again. Ten years to bring a Seelie down to my level or at least half way between. It was worth the wait. “Hungry?” Scotch spooned up some more beans and hovered them in front of my mouth. I growled that I wasn’t an infant and reached for the spoon. I managed to get at least one third of the spoonful in my mouth, the rest on my chin and blanket.
“So,” Scotch said as I mopped my face with the blanket, “I’m still waiting on that story. Why are you called Seven?”
I had threatened to kill and had killed one or two who had been foolish enough to say my birth name aloud in the Dark Court. I had been known as nothing but Seven since I could heft a sword, but if I owed anyone, it was my partner. Wasn’t this a bitch?
“It’s short for seventeen,” I gave in and grumbled. “When I was born my father was drunk. Well, he was always drunk, but he was drooling drunk this time. When he stood at my mother’s birthing bed to name me, he became, they told me,” I winced and it wasn’t because of a bullet wound, “caught up in the moment. He declared I’d be called Prince of Shadows, he who rides among the storm clouds and will forge the blackest and mightiest of swords to strike down the White Army, spilling their blood as a river…by then he sobered up some and remembered my mother had slept with his three brothers, his archenemy and I think Titania. Mom always liked to mix it up. That’s when he added Born of a whore who would rut with any barnyard boar that would have her. And then he passed out or I wouldn’t be Seven. I’d be Twenty or Thirty. Seven is short for seventeen which is short for seventeen syllables. He thought I was a cretin because I couldn’t memorize my name until I was fifty.” Which to give me credit was about a human child of four. “There. That’s your story. Happy now?”